Anxiety & Panic Questions and Answers

Throughout my years of helping people
with Anxiety and Panic I have given various answers to all sorts of
questions, and certain questions have come up far more than others. So,
for everyone's benefit, I have listed some of the more popular ones
below.

Q.1 Why do I feel better in certain situations and not in others?

This is a very common one and it all
comes down to how you think in other situations.

For example, you may feel better in
the safety of your own home rather than at a family gathering. The only
difference in these situations is in the way you think. You are the same
person and it is not the situation that makes you feel worse, it is your
thought pattern and memory working together.

You may spend the day worrying about
going to a particular function, setting your body up to be anxious on
arrival, and then blame it on the situation you are in rather than the
thought pattern you have created during the day while at home. You may
get there and then also worry about making a fool of yourself, spending the whole time tensing and trying to
control how you feel and creating more anxiety. Do you see how we do
this to ourselves? It is not the situation, but our perception of the
situation, that causes us to feel more anxious.

You must just accept how you feel
wherever you are and in whatever situation you find yourself. Deal with
yourself and not the place. If your feel apprehensive then that's fine.
Don't try to feel any different than you do or try to keep some kind
of grip on yourself; release this grip. All you are feeling is a
harmless surge of energy. Nothing will happen if you allow this energy
to go through you without fighting or suppressing it. When you allow
yourself to feel this energy, then it is able to release itself. It is
only when you try to fight and suppress it that it keeps recycling
itself, and because you have not allowed it, it will keep coming back
for another attempt at being released. You have to realise that this
energy wants to be free of you, as much as you want to be free of it.
This is why you will never recover by trying to constantly suppress or
avoid how you feel; you can never be free of what you refuse to feel.

If you truly accept how you feel in
every situation and stop trying to keep a grip on yourself or looking
for the easy exit, you will find that, although you may feel
uncomfortable at times, nothing bad happens to you, and as time goes by
your reactions lessen until you feel more able to cope, day by day. Anxiety
loves avoidance, so take its power away, move
forward and embrace these feelings of fear. This is the key. Moving
towards your fears is far more productive than hiding from them. By
continually hiding and running away from how you feel, you are training
your mind and body that there is danger in normal, everyday activities
and teaching it that its reaction is correct and needed. The mind is
just doing what it is designed to do and is just responding to the
signals you are giving it. So, if you allow yourself to feel the way you
do without avoiding or running away, you are teaching your mind that you
are fine and that there is no danger here. The only language it
understands is your actions; it watches and listens to your behaviour
and is taught to react that way. So, when you tell it that you are fine
through your actions of non-avoidance, it will then start to listen. It
will understand that you're totally safe and in time will switch off
this protection system.

Avoiding symptoms just does not work, as you must realise by
now. You need to let all feelings be there and not avoid them, but go
through them, even invite them in. This worked for me. I ignored my
body's instinct to avoid and started to embrace how I felt. I moved
towards the feelings of fear and apprehension. Eventually, I started to
understand my condition so much more and regain control. I was in charge
again and could act independently of my thoughts and feelings. I did not
get rid of fear; I just got to know it and lost my fear of it by
realising its harmless nature. It then held no power over me.

Q.2 Will these feelings ever go away?

Yes, they will. Once you understand
why you feel like you do, you can then start to unmask a lot of the
fears you hold about anxiety. There are so many myths about anxiety that
it worries me just how many people are misinformed and truly believe
they will never get better and that they will just have to live with
this condition forever. Too many people spend years like I did,
searching for that elusive miracle cure that just does not exist. Your
body has been through a lot in the time you have had this condition. It
may be emotionally
spent and feel so tired. None
of this has done you any long-term harm. Just see your mind and body as
running at 50% at the moment. Letting your mind and body recover at its
own pace is the key. An overnight cure is impossible after what you have
been through. But what a journey recovery can be when we allow it to
happen.

Understanding anxiety also takes away so much fear out of how we
feel. A lot of anxiety is habit, a learned behaviour that can be
reversed. Every stage and symptom has a logical explanation that can be
explained. With less fear and more understanding, we also calm the
constant worrying. It is the lack of information on the subject that
keeps the worry cycle going. Constant worrying that we will never get better also adds to the belief that we will just have
to live with it.

Once we start to understand anxiety
and apply the understanding we have learnt to start recovery, then
change can be dramatic. In my recovery, I found that the more knowledge
I had and the more I understood my condition, then the easier it was to
allow how I felt and get on with living. I started to lose the fear of
my symptoms. Eventually they began to hold less power over me and I
started to pay them less respect. My attention began to become more
outward than inward.

It is your desperation to rid yourself
of how you feel that keeps your anxiety alive. The stress you put on
yourself day in day out and the constant
worrying and thinking about your condition,
wears you out mentally. It's time to stop beating yourself up about how
you feel and give your mind and body the rest it craves.

Knowledge is power. The less you fear
your symptoms, the less they mean. This also stops the worry cycle you
may find yourself in, which is the very thing that keeps anxiety going;
the very thing that keeps you trying to suppress or avoid how you feel.
You are bound to worry if you don't know what is wrong with you. That is
why you need an explanation to help break this cycle. Once you truly
understand anxiety then you can move on to fully allowing. Allowing
yourself to feel this excess energy is what clears it up. You can never
be free of anything you try to suppress or fight. You can never be free
of anything you refuse to feel.

Q.3 Why do I seem to have so many scary / negative thoughts running
around all day?

The reason you seem to have your
attention on yourself all day and it feels like there are numerous thoughts running through your mind is because of all your confusion about how you
feel. You go around in circles all day long, looking for answers and
trying to find a way out of this hell. Some people may even stay up all
night reflecting on the whole day, trying to figure it all out. Mostly
these are negative or worrying thoughts and that's why they seem to come automatically and
with so much force. Worrying eventually becomes a habit. When you are in
an anxious state, emotions seem to be ten-fold. Everything magnifies; a
little problem becomes massive and something that you could dismiss when
you were healthy, sticks around all day.

Looking at it from another angle, when
people meditate, they stop thinking for hours on end until it becomes a
habit and they can go all day without a worrying thought. That is why
they feel so refreshed. Not you! Your thoughts just carry on and on
and when your mind is tired, like it is now, it grasps hold of every
thought, pulls them in and they seem to stick. Some people worry to the
extent that they believe everything they feel is life threatening. A
headache becomes a brain tumour, a stomach ache can become cancer and so
on, and no matter how many times their doctor tells them there is
nothing wrong with them, they are never quite convinced. If this is you,
then realise these thoughts of illness are just figments of your
imagination, created by your anxious state. Everything becomes magnified
when we are anxious. Let these thoughts come and go, don't react to
them and see them as just that, thoughts that carry no weight
whatsoever, no matter how scary they are or how loud they shout.

When we try too hard to do ANYTHING,
it seems to slip further from reach. This applies to ridding oneself of
unwanted thoughts. The more you "try" to push them away, the
longer they linger and the stronger their impact. When we welcome
unwanted thoughts, they lose their significance and quickly diminish.
When you impose a false sense of importance upon a thought, it will
often appear more serious than it is.

Time is a great healer, especially
concerning this condition. I allowed any thought to be there and I did
not react. When I did this, I noticed the scary thoughts seem to lose
their edge. There is no need to fight them or try
and rid yourself of scary/negative thoughts. These run on the fuel of
your anxious energy, mixed with the momentum in your mind. The momentum
occurs because of all the constant thinking and worrying about your
current state, so the mind never gets a break or a chance to relax and
then, because of this, it seems constantly active and out of control.
The mind becomes like one of those spinning plates where the momentum of
someone continually rotating it, keeps the plate spinning. The same
theory applies to your mind, the more you worry and go over things, the
more momentum your mind gains and so it always feels busy and
continually throws out random thoughts. Mix this is in with your anxious
state and you have a whole host of continuous, negative thinking.

Don't ever think, "I must not
think that". Let all thoughts come, do not run away from any of
them. See them for what they are - thoughts - exaggerated because of the
way you feel. They can do you no harm and they mean nothing. They
won't be around when you recover, so pay them no respect. Once you
stop worrying and going over things then your mind will finally get the
break it needs and its momentum will then slow down as you are pulling
away its fuel.

So, accept that at first your thoughts
may still run for a while until the momentum in the mind runs out. Just
allow the mind to be like a free running computer, let it throw out what
it wishes and think as much as it wishes, while you go about your day
giving no importance to its noise and antics. This is the way to give it
the break it so craves and then it will come to its own resting place.
Never get into a battle with your mind or try to force it to be
different or quieten down through any kind of force or will power. Never
get into a battle with your mind; you will always lose. The content of
your mind is not what is important, it is your constant involvement and
fascination with it that keeps fuelling it.

Q.4 Why did anxiety chose me?

Anxiety does not choose certain
people. It is not something you just get like a cold. Anxiety is the
result of your body and mind being overworked, be it through long hours
or stress at work, a problem or collection of problems that you have
been worrying about for a period of time. Your nerves have taken on so
much for too long and go 'bad', as many put it. If you work anything
beyond its capabilities, whether it be a blender, a vacuum cleaner or a
car, it will break down or begin to clunk and run badly. Your body is
the same. So, anxiety is not an 'it'. It is not something your body
wants to go through. It is your body and mind telling you it can no
longer work at the pressure you are putting it under. That is why it is
important to take your symptoms with a pinch of salt and not get
stressed about the way you feel, adding more stress and worry to an
already tired mind and body that craves a break from its current
onslaught.

Anxiety really is your body's way of
talking to you, telling you that you can't carry on this way; that
what you are doing is doing you no good. Suffering is always a wake-up
call to change. Your mind and body is not built for the worry and stress
you are putting it under. If you eat bad food you will suffer and be
sick. If you drink too much alcohol you will get a hangover and feel
bad. This is your body's way of telling you not to do it; it's not
doing you any good. If you feel pain anywhere, it is your body telling
you there is a problem in that area. These laws are true for
psychological suffering too. It is just your body's way of telling you
there is a problem. It is not telling you to get rid of anything. It is
telling you to change things; to stop doing what you are doing and then
the suffering will go away. You will never fix worrying with worrying.
You will never fix anxiety by being anxious over it. The only way to
cure suffering is to stop doing what is causing that suffering.

Q.5 I feel so unreal and out of touch with the world around me. Am I
going mad?

This question was by far the most
popular, so I have now created a page dedicated to this symptom known as
depersonalisation, just click the link below to take you direct to the
page.